Tampere University

Tampere University

With almost 20 000 undergraduate and 2500 PhD students, Tampere University is Finland’s second largest multidisciplinary higher education institution. We place our faith in human potential and scientific knowledge. The spearheads of our research and learning are technology, health, and society, and “Revolution of Light and Image” has been identified are one of our key research areas.

Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Smart Photonic Materials Group (SPM; http://research.tuni.fi/spm). The SPM group focuses works at the interface between chemistry, physics, and materials engineering. We are interested in developing functional and stimuli-responsive materials, with particular focus on light-controllable systems. Our activities are centered around soft robotics, soft-matter photonics, light-controllable biomaterials and functional supramolecular systems. We are part of National Photonics and Innovation platform PREIN (http://prein.fi).

Principal investigator

Arri Priimägi is a professor in Chemistry in Tampere University, Finland, and one of the PIs of the STORM-BOTS project. He leads a research group Smart Photonic Materials, a multidisciplinary bunch of some 15 chemists, physicists and biomaterials scientists. The activities of the SPM group are centered around light-responsive materials and their use in four areas: soft robotics, soft-matter photonics, advanced biomaterials and functional supramolecular systems. In the field of light-driven robotics, the group has recently developed several high-visibility bioinspired actuator systems such as an artificial flytrap-mimic, a self-regulating iris-like actuator as well as demonstration of an actuator that mimics associative learning. Despite relatively young age, Arri has gathered ca. 6 M€ research funding as a PI, including ERC Starting and Proof of Concept Grants. He has published ca. 110 research articles (including journals such as Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Chem, …) that have gained ca. 6700 citations. In 2018 he received an Academy of Finland Award for Scientific Courage, for “carving out a unique niche between the boundaries of basic and applied research”.

Key personnel